The European Court of Justice Slaps Down Hungary: A Defense of Modern Federalism

The European Court of Justice (ECJ), the E.U.’s supreme court, which like the U.S. counterpart can overrule state courts, ordered the E.U. state of Hungary to pay a lump sum of €200 million and €1 million per day of delay from June 12, 2024 because the state government had disregarded “the principle of sincere cooperation” between states in taking in their fair share of foreign asylum-seekers and “deliberately” evaded implementing the federal law that directs the states how to treat those people who enter the E.U. through the state seeking political asylum.[1] The state government had made it “virtually impossible” for asylum seekers to file applications.[2] Similar to the Nullification Acts passed by the state government of South Carolina in the U.S. when that union was between 30 and 40 years old, the decision of Hungary to ignore the ECJ’s ruling on the matter in 2020 could not be tolerated by federal authorities, for a federal system of dual sovereignty (i.e., some held at the federal level and the rest at the state level) cannot survive if state governments can unilaterally decide to nullify, or ignore federal law. That federal directives in the E.U. reply on implementation into law at the state level just makes the E.U. more vulnerable should a state government so easily dismiss federal law. Why even be in a union if its law is deemed not worthy of respect?

The full essay is at "The ECJ Slaps Down Hungary."

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1. Jorge Liboreiro, “ECJ Finds Hungary with €200 Million over ‘Extremely Serious’ Breach of E.U. Asylum Law,” Euronews.com, June 12, 2024 (accessed June 13, 2024).
2. Ibid.

Lolita

In being able to engage an audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society, reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human condition.

The full essay is at "Lolita."